If you read to the this end of this post, you can see another user with the same issue - it’s exactly the same on the OT and nothing has changed.
I’ve been thinking about this and why it would occur, it must be to do with sample loading. If you change to a pattern that doesn’t hold all the samples currently in memory, it must have to load them from disk, which would cause a delay, samples not to fire. Queuing the PR-CH gives time to load it all - that’s my guess.
This queuing is literally a deal breaker for me. It means the Digitakt is the only machine in my hardware setup that will not load a PR-CH when requested. It means that I cannot be used as a reliable live performance tool alongside Ableton, or indeed any setup that requires it to respond to program changes immediately. All program changes have to be fired at least a bar / 4bars early (depending on your sequence), which means you can’t use Ableton Clip View to simply jam along with the Digitakt as everything is consistently late. Ok, I could just change patterns manually, but it gets messy, complex and essentially worrying, which such a shame…
I’m going to email Elektron directly - my MPC1000 never acted like this, as far as I can remember…